Dev Newsletter: 2 November 2012
Richard Archer
Nov. 2, 2012
We've got a lot to get through this week, so let's get started;
2012 Rails Rumble winners… (Lee)
We start off this week's post with the results of the recent Rails Rumble contest: http://railsrumble.com/entries/winners
.. and the winners' perferred choice of gem
Dwellable have written up a nice breakdown of the gems used by this year's Rails Rumble winners: http://www.dwellable.com/blog/Rails-Rumble-Winners-Gem-Teardown
On upgrading to Rails 4 (Lee)
One of the significant new changes in Rails 4 is strong parameters, which can apparently easily be included in your Rails 3 app. Here's a more in-depth look. http://iconoclastlabs.com/cms/blog/posts/upgrading-to-rails-4-parameters-security-tour
Ruby 2.0.0-preview1 released
Exactly what it says on the tin. With 10% more Japanese. http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-dev/46348
Ruby 2.0 patch promises to make Rails faster (Leo)
So there's a Ruby 2.0 patch that promises to make Rails startup 2.2x faster. Unsurprisingly, it revolves around optimising the "require" keyword. It sounds very promising and definitely worth a read. http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7158
Jolyon's found something interesting on mocking
Using mocks in our Rails tests hasn't always produced elegant and highly maintainable test code. The assumption was that there must be a better way and no doubt there is room for improvement but having watched Justin Searls' talk To Mock or Not to Mock, it looks as if Rails + mocking is in no way a walk in the park.
Honeybadger.io
For those that weren't enticed enough to click the Rails Rumble link above; here's Honeybadger, pitched to me as a 'cheaper and better alternative to Airbrake'. Is it any good? I have no idea. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. https://www.honeybadger.io/
getUserMedia and realtime ASCII-fication (Carl)
Get your webcams ready: http://enotionz.github.com/jscii/
Giving Lifehacker a run for their money (Murray)
For those who like lists of new tools to try out: http://carpeaqua.com/2012/10/15/my-ultimate-developer-and-power-users-tool-list-for-mac-os-x-2012-edition-/
'Trimming the fat' - Paul Robert Lloyd
Nice case study of the steps taken by the OP to optimise the performance of his site: http://paulrobertlloyd.com/2012/11/trimming_the_fat/
[INTERVAL!]
Well that was exciting wasn't it? Let's take a little break. Just sit back, put your feet up and enjoy the contributed kitten GIF gallery for a few minutes. We'll wait for you here, see you in a bit. Just ignore that some people can't tell the difference between gifs and jpgs…
::Wireframing App Of The Week::
Continuing our semi-regular feature: wireframe.cc
book: "Ruby Under a Microscope" (Matt Peperell)
Typically when using a program language we don't about the details of the underlying implementation. But what about those cases when we do care? The newly published book "Ruby Under a Microscope" should sate those needs. Available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats, you can find details at http://patshaughnessy.net/ruby-under-a-microscope
video: Alex Sexton on Client side i18n (Carl)
video: JavaScript is the new Punk Rock
editor plugin: Emmet
Previously known as the web development toolkit Zen Coding, Emmet has been released with improved parsing and range of snippets. Basically, it's a way to type CSS-like expressions in your editor and produce expanded markup. It is compatible with most major editors.
…and something for the Vim users
In the interests of balance, I found something for Vim as well; Vundle - think Bundler for Vim and you're basically there.
Things Happening in the Outside World™
XpDay2012 : "This might be good" (Murray) http://xpday.wordpress.com/join-in-register/
Node Knockout: http://nodeknockout.com/
MxM Interface Developer meetup : "Made by Many are planning a new meet-up for Interface Developers in January and they're looking for people who would be willing to talk (and attend)." (Richard S) http://madebymany.com/blog/a-new-meet-up-for-interface-developers
Cape Town Front-end Developers meetup : "Cape Town finally has it's own FE group - which kicked off in grand style last week with a talk from HTML5 and Opera evangelist Bruce Lawson" http://www.meetup.com/ctfeds/